Rand Paul

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says blaming the tea party for America's debt crisis is like blaming the fireman for fires.

"The Tea Party has been fighting for a serious solution that would rescue our finances through immediate spending cuts, spending caps and most importantly, a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution," Paul said in a statement on his Web site. "With the support of the Tea Party, I offered the only solution that could have prevented our downgrade with our Cut, Cap and Balance plan.”

Vice President Biden was criticized Monday over reports of a private meeting he had with House Democrats in which Tea Party Republicans were compared to “terrorists," though Biden denies he described Republicans that way.

A senior Democratic official told Fox News that Biden made such comments in reaction to a heated conversation with liberal House members like Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., who were venting that Republicans got too much out of the debt ceiling deal unveiled the night before and "acted like terrorists."

The comment drew an immediate rebuke from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., one of the most outspoken Tea Party-aligned lawmakers in Congress...

Conservatives have talked wistfully for years about eliminating the Education Department, but a host of Republican "tea party" candidates this election year are saying it's time to move beyond talk and force Congress to vote.

From West Virginia to Kentucky to Nevada, GOP Senate candidates have said they favor elimination of the Cabinet office, created as a separate department by President Carter in 1979 to elevate the federal government's profile on what had been considered a primarily local concern.

Senate candidate Rand Paul, in his Republican primary campaign in Kentucky, was among the first tea-party-backed candidates to revive the idea that the 30-year-old agency had failed students and that the states could do a better job...

WASHINGTON - With the electorate's intense anger reverberating across the country, this is all but certain: It's an anti-Washington, anti-establishment year. And candidates with ties to either better beware.

Any doubt about just how toxic the political environment is for congressional incumbents and candidates hand-picked by national Republican and Democratic leaders disappeared late Tuesday, when voters fired Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, forced Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a run-off in Arkansas and chose tea party darling Rand Paul to be the GOP nominee in Kentucky's Senate race.

"People just aren't very happy," Ira Robbins, 61, said in Allentown, Pa.